WHAT DID THE ARCHBISHOP ACTUALLY SAY ABOUT “SHARIA” LAW?

From the Website of the Archbishop of Canterbury:

(www.archbishopofcanterbury.org)

1) PRESS RELEASE dated Thursday 7^th February

– issued in conjunction with the BBC Interview and the Lecture Series “Islam in English Law”

Archbishop: UK law needs to find accommodation with religious law codes

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has said that UK law needs to continue to find accommodation with religious legal codes such as the Islamic system of Sharia if community cohesion and development are to be achieved.

Speaking to the BBC ahead of the opening lecture in a series on Islam in English Law being given tonight to legal academics, in which he calls for the legal establishment to engage with these issues, Dr Williams said that the ability of the law of the land to accommodate religious perspectives, as it had already done with the Jewish Halacha, was essential:

"... certain provision of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law; so it's not as if we're bringing in an alien and rival system; we already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justified conscientious objections in certain circumstances in providing certain kinds of social relations."

Whilst speaking in the main about principles of Sharia law, the point applied generally to other religious principles: "We have orthodox Jewish courts operating in this country legally and in a regulated way because there are modes of dispute resolution and customary provisions which apply there in the light of Talmud. It's not a new problem, not to mention the questions ... about how the consciences of Catholics, Anglicans and others who have difficulty over issues like abortion are accommodated within the Law; so the whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways in which the law of the land pays respect to custom and community; that's already there."

That, he said, did not mean that he was advocating the wholesale adoption of Sharia and certainly not the kinds of practical expressions of it seen in some parts of the world:

"... nobody in their right mind, I think, would want to see in this country a kind of inhumanity that sometimes appears to be associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states [with] the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well."

Safeguards he said, were vital and UK law was in a strong position to provide these:

"...I think it would be quite wrong to say that we could ever licence so to speak a system of law for some communities which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general."

UK law needed to engage properly with the religious concerns and motivations of members of the communities which made up society he said; 

"What we don't want I think is either a stand-off where the law squares up to religious consciences over something like abortion or indeed by forcing a vote on some aspects of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in the commons as it were a secular discourse saying 'we have no room for conscientious objections'; we don't want that, we don't either I think want a situation where because there's no way of legally monitoring what communities do, making them part of public process, people do what they like in private in such a way that that becomes a way of intensifying oppression within a community and that happens; that happens."

2) PRESS RELEASE dated Friday 8^th February

- issued in response to Media “interest”

The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.

Instead, in the interview, rather than proposing a parallel system of law, he observed that "as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law" . When the question was put to him that: "the application of sharia in certain circumstances - if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion - seems unavoidable?", he indicated his assent.

The Archbishop opened his lecture by noting importantly that the very term “sharia” is not only misunderstood, but is the focus of much fear and anxiety deriving from its 'primitivist' application in some contexts. As such he said that sharia is a method of law rather than a single complete and final system ready to be applied wholesale to every situation, and noted that there was room, even within Islamic states which apply sharia, for some level of 'dual identity', where the state is not in fact religiously homogenous.

In his lecture, the Archbishop sought carefully to explore the limits of a unitary and secular legal system in the presence of an increasingly plural (including religiously plural) society and to see how such a unitary system might be able to accommodate religious claims. Behind this is the underlying principle that Christians cannot claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds (for instance in situations where Christian doctors might not be compelled to perform abortions), if they are not willing to consider how a unitary system can accommodate other religious consciences. In doing so the Archbishop was not suggesting the introduction of parallel legal jurisdictions, but exploring ways in which reasonable accommodation might be made within existing arrangements for religious conscience.

He explained that his core aim was to: "to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state" and was using sharia as an example. These include:

- How when the law does not take seriously religious motivation, it fails to engage with the community in question and opens up real issues of power by the majority over the minority, with potentially harmful effects for community cohesion.
- How the distinction between cultural practices and those arising from genuine religious belief might be managed.
- How to deal with the possibility that a 'supplementary jurisdiction "could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women".

At the end of the lecture the Archbishop referred to a suggestion by a Jewish jurist that there might be room for 'overlapping jurisdictions' in which "individuals might choose in certain limited areas whether to seek justice under one system or another". This is what currently happens both within the Jewish arrangements and increasingly in current alternative dispute resolution and mediation practice.

He concludes his lecture with the comment:

"if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment"

The lecture, which was given before an audience of about 1000 people and which was chaired by the Lord Chief Justice, was the first in a series of six lectures and discussions which are being given by senior Muslim and other lawyers and theologians at the Temple Church on the general theme of 'Islam in English Law'.

Roger Clarke